Overcoming the gender gap in agriculture is nowadays one of the focal points of major international institutions, governments and development agencies. In this paper, we discuss some effects of international aid in rural contexts on gender dynamics and women’s empowerment. Through the analysis of some small-scale projects in Northern Senegal – implemented within a wide rural development aid program in West Africa - we develop some reflections on the observed women-oriented projects: we stress the risk that women end up being “locked” into pre-defined roles, namely in small-scale food processing activities, by a standardized logic of aid projects. We develop an analysis of the practices that may lead to this outcome and of the characteristics of such “women roles” in value chains. We discuss this observation in the light of the gendered division of tasks in primary products value chains and of the literature on the integration of “gender” in development thinking. By means of this analysis, we draw some reflections on the discrepancy between explicit empowerment goals and unintended outcomes of aid.